


Red Whispers

by TK_DuVeraun



Series: Fi’laëwel Lavellan [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Red Lyrium, rating-consist descriptions of hunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-14 15:11:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14138667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TK_DuVeraun/pseuds/TK_DuVeraun
Summary: Fi’laëwel Lavellan has traveled alone since Daeron's supposed death, but she never needed his help to survive. Without any destination, she wanders into Emprise du Lion where she finds strange, crumbly red rock jutting unnaturally up out of the snow. She's not really dressed for the cold, but something about the rock keeps her from leaving.---Part of a media trade with@Vilemiea lovely creator who makes amazing gifs and fantastic art. Check her out and learn more about her absolutely fascinating character Fi. (And Swan! He's a doll.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have another piece lined up I am obligated to do, but after that I am interested in doing trades for Fake Dragon Age Companion Wiki Pages. [Here's the tag for it on my tumblr if you want to see what I mean](https://tk-duveraun.tumblr.com/tagged/fox-companion-au).

Orlais was cold. At least, this part of Orlais was cold. Fi’laëwel wasn’t in the Dales, so the specifics weren’t really important. What was important was that it was cold. Snow sat heavy and frozen into thick chunks from frequent slight meltings followed by refreezing. It was under trees and hiding in the shadows behind shem buildings, but it was in the center of the roads between the deep cart tracks and in the middle of open fields.

They were probably fields.

Fi wasn’t sure what day it was. She didn’t keep track; they passed just fine on their own without her minding them, so why should she have to? But despite not knowing the date, she was fairly certain it shouldn’t be so cold. While her nug was cooking over the fire, she used a stick to flip over a large chunk of ice. Only a single bug clung into the underside of the ice and skittered around to find the new bottom. She stirred up the cold, compacted dirt and frowned at it. Not even a single worm.

That night, Fi used a piece of charcoal from the fire to take notes. She was just west of the Frostbacks. And more north than the Dales. She looked up through the clear night air. That was Belanas. And Solium was remarkably clear. She jotted down all of the constellations she could make out and then scribbled a picture of the single, lonely bug she’d found.

It was cold. It was very cold, even wrapped up in the august ram-skin cloak with the fancy embroidery that Daeron acquired for her, so long ago. He had been so good at acquiring things. Usually they were ugly, stupid, or useless things - sometimes they were all three - but he never had to trade away any of Fi’s most interesting bugs to get them. And the silk thread she always picked out of the dresses was so useful. Infinitely stronger than catgut and not prone to smelling bad if it was made improperly.

She made a note to head for the Dales in the morning.

By the time the sun rose the next morning, too cold to melt the ice and too bright against the snow, she’d completely forgotten that she wanted to leave.

\---

The shems called the area Emprise du Lion. They probably thought their older generations named it that after the red lions that used to live in the Frostbacks. Fi was certain it was named as a celebration of their forced extinction of the animals. The shems certainly loved glorifying their genocides. She needed to only look at the gloriously over-decorated way the words “Exalted Plains” were written in large letters across a wide section of her map to know that.

Sahrnia was the only proper shem town in the area. All of the residents were sharp in their cheeks and dark around their eyes in the same way that city elves always were. They looked as frail as sick children at the end of winter, but even if Fi didn’t know the date she knew she wasn’t off by an entire season.

There weren’t any merchants to be seen, so Fi kept her fur-lined hood up over her ears and walked through the town with that silly, stiff-backed stride that shems thought made them look purposeful and important. Years before, when they first left Lavellan, Daeron had told her that was how to avoid shem attention. Walk like them, but more important. Fi thought it was silly, but she didn’t usually question him and it  _ did _ work.

No one spoke to her or even tried to make eye contact as she left the town as quickly as she’d come. The sunlight reflecting off the snow hurt Fi’s eyes and the freezing air bit and snapped at her raw and red nose. She set her bags on a short, stone wall and dug through the pack with the red ribbons until she found her spare chemise. She wrapped it around her face like a scarf and tied it in place with the sleeves. Satisfied that she wouldn’t damage her sense of smell in the cold, Fi stalked confidently off the road and along a game trail.

The trail was easy to follow with how the ice covered most of the underbrush. Though pace was frustratingly slow as she took care to avoid slipping, it was obvious that the local fauna had just as much difficulty. The ice was scuffed and cracked from quick hooves. The few bushes hardy enough to hold the weight of the frozen snow had occasional tufts of light-colored fur where leaves should have been.

Long after the last possible view of Sahrnia was past, Fi heard the unmistakable whine of a nug. She stuck her cold hand under her thin, leather chestpiece and removed the small oilskin bag that held her bowstring. She wrestled with the catgut for so long Daeron would have laughed, but eventually had her bow strung and ready to fire. Her ears twitched in the confines of her hood as she approached the animal.

After stalking past a few trees, Fi caught sight of it. It whined, but was otherwise still as stone, staring at a crumbly red outcropping of rock. Fi took the easy shot and then unstrung her bow before even confirming the kill. She immediately stuffed the string back into the oilskin pouch and the pouch back into her armor. She carried the nug by one of its back feet as she stalked closer to the rocky hillside.

The sun hung low in the sky as Fi picked her careful way along the hillside. Finally, she found a narrow crevice she could just barely squeeze into. She tossed the nug and her packs through the larger gap at the top before slithering in after her things. Once inside, she dug the sturdy torch out of her pack with the ribbons that were once white and lit it with her flintstone. Carefully, she pawed through the same pack until she pulled out a pack of dried leaves that were once bright blue. She placed one on the torch’s flame and then watched the plume of pitch-black smoke. 

It sat in the air for only a moment before drifting higher and getting sucked away by some unseen air current. Fi blew out the torch and then left her cave to find wood. She threw the mostly-dry branches into the cave, heedless of the possibility that they would land on the torch and set her packs aflame.

But when she returned to build her firepit the only thing on fire was her torch, so it hardly mattered. She skinned the nug and inspected the meat and organs. It had been sitting too still when she shot it. She didn’t want to eat something that was sick. When she found nothing unusual, she set it to roasting before pulling out her map and drawing a few symbols where she thought her cave was. Once the meat was cooked to her satisfaction, Fi pulled a scrap of mostly-blank paper out of her pack with the red ribbons and noted down the nug’s strange behavior and that weird, crumbly, red rock.

\---

The next day, Fi returned to the crumbly red rock with a few pieces of paper laced together with linen thread. With a piece of charcoal from her campfire, she sketched the rock with a circle of nugs around it. She hunted around for a stick she could use in her fire later and then poked the rock with it. It crumbled like shale, but the crumbs stuck together like wet sand. She made a considering noise and leaned in close to get a better look.

Something was very odd about it. And looking at it made Fi hungry. She frowned and walked the rock, poking it with her stick the whole way. It crumbled on all sides. It didn’t seem to matter if it was in the shade or not. Fi wasn’t sure  _ why _ the crumbly red rock was important, but if she could use it to snare animals, that would be good.

She went to the largest tree in sight of the rock and dug under the frozen snow with her stick until she got to the dirt and icy loam. She then stirred up the dirt until two chubby earworms were near enough the surface for her to snatch.

…

One chubby earthworm in two pieces. Close enough.

She stirred up the dirt some more and finally unearthed a pillbug. With her writhing worm pieces and pillbug, she returned to the red rock. Fi dropped one half of the worm onto the solid part and the other half onto the crumbly sand. Both halves sizzled like they were cooking. They shrank and curled up until they were reduced to dry spirals.

The pillbug was placed on the sand. It scrambled to run away, all of its legs flailing and kicking at the red, mushy sand, but it didn’t get anywhere. It curled into a ball, but tiny grains of the red rock were already lodged between the segments of its carapace and before long, the tiny legs stopped moving. Fi waited another minute and then poked it with a twig until she was positive it was dead.

She sat next to the rock, but not touching it, and took more notes. Every few lines, she would glance at the rock, making sure it was still there. By the time she reached the middle of the second page, she could barely see. Fi looked up to see if the clouds blocking the sun meant snow was coming, but there  _ were _ no clouds. It was simply dusk. She shoved the papers back in her bag, the last page catching on one of the red ribbons.

She dragged the end of the stick on the ground as she walked back to her cave, liking the sound it made, even if it would have warned potential prey. She didn’t need more prey. She still had half a nug. She used the stick to stir and wake the smouldering ashes of her fire before just leaving it in the pit to catch fire. Fi propped her head on her packs as she ate her dinner and thought over the notes she’d made on the red rock. 

There was nothing special about it except how much she  _ hungered _ to know more about it. It was as captivating as her childhood lessons on winding a good bowstring and how to aim at a moving target. Daeron was always shite at those lessons. When she tried to sleep that night, the red embers from the fire kept flashing across her closed eyelids. Eventually, she just wrapped her face in her spare chemise and grumbled wordless sounds into her pack until exhaustion claimed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you like Fi? She's baller, right? Check out her creator here [@Vilemie](https://vilemie.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Normally, I try to post later in the day, but it's already mid-afternoon for the target audience, so cheers!

The road leading through the snow to Sahrnia’s quarry was clear. Either side of it was piled high with mud-blackened ice. Fi poked the piled snow with her new stick, this one still green in the middle and unsuitable for a campfire. The refrozen snow didn’t react to the stick, but small clumps of dried mud and long-dead grasses fell at the prodding. Unconcerned with  _ why _ she was doing it, Fi jabbed the ice with more force until a chunk broke off and fell to the road. 

She leaned over the displaced ice and blinked at it. Embedded in the mud and ice was a chunk of that crumbly red rock. Fi knelt staring at it with her head tilted to the side for a few minutes before she turned to dig through her pack with the red ribbons. At the bottom was a pair of shem trousers she’d been using for scraps. She cut off a new section with her knife and then used it to pick up the ice with the red rock. 

The cold barely touched her thoughts as Fi kept walking down the road, her eyes glued to the red rock in her ice chunk. On closer examination she noticed that what she’d initially thought was a stick embedded in the red rock was actually a fragment of animal bone. And instead of the rock having an indent where the bone pierced it… It seemed to be forming  _ around _ the bone. Tiny veins of red streaked up the sides of the bone in sharp lines like lightning.

Several times, Fi caught herself reaching out to touch the bone or the rock or both, but she hadn’t survived exile and shem raids to let a piece of bone and red rock make her decisions for her. Even though she didn’t touch it, she kept a hold on the ice chunk holding it captive and switched it between hands as the cold seeped through her gloves. When she heard the sound of a cart coming from the direction of the quarry, Fi hopped over the pile of frozen snow and jumped from snoufleur track to snoufleur track to prevent leaving any of her own.

She left her ice chunk and red rock at the base of a tree that she scaled just moments before the cart came in sight. Fi slipped through the branches until she could get a good look at the cart and its handlers. That they might see her never crossed her mind. Shems never looked up.

They were probably Orlesians. Their clothes were ugly and impractical and their accents made them nearly impossible to understand. There were also ten of them for a single cart because shems were cowards. Fi wrinkled her nose at them and the dry, raw skin cracked painfully. Though she kept her eyes on them, Fi stopped listening to their conversation as she dug around under her breastplate for the jar of elfroot paste she kept there.

She winced when the paste touched her broken skin, but at least it wasn’t  _ cold _ paste. And Daeron had laughed at her when she put it there. 

“You can’t just store everything in your bodice; there won’t be any space!” He’d said. He’d then stared at her with his arms crossed over his own chest until she said something.

Fi hadn’t wanted to. There hadn’t been anything to say. He had been wrong. That was it. But even then she’d known he would stare, unmoving, until he got an answer and they needed to hunt food for them, so she finally said, “There’s space for everything I need.”

He’d looked at her aghast, then, but in a friendly way, not the cold-angry-scared way their clan always used to. He’d gestured roundly in front of his chest and started to say, “What about-” before giving up with a sigh. After taking far too long to string his bow, they’d finally gone off to hunt.

Even though he was long past being able to see it, Fi stuck her tongue out at Daeron’s memory because she was nineteen and there was still plenty of space for her things under her armor. By the time she finally looked back down at road, the cart was nearly out of sight in the distance. She leapt straight from the branches back onto the road and frowned down at the trail of debris from the cart. 

There were chunks of bloodstone and dawnstone, which she expected from the quarry, but there were also traces of that red, crumbly rock she’d never seen before entering Emprise du Lion. She didn’t have her stick, so she pushed the red dirt around with a chunk of dawnstone. After what it did to the bugs and that bone, she wasn’t going to risk her leather boots. She frowned at it for a minute before scraping the softest snow she could find on the top of the piles,

Using both hands, she compacted it against her chestplate until it was mostly flat, then she pressed it onto the debris from the cart. She shaped the snow like a bowl and then compressed it as hard as she could. When it refused to condense any further, she carefully flipped the snow over. She smiled. The dawnstone and drakestone and red crumbly rock were all solidly lodged into the snow. 

After wrapping up her new ice chunk in the last piece of the trousers, Fi hopped over the ice wall and collected her first sample. She wrapped them both up in the fabric until she had a sling-like thing. Mission complete, she stalked towards the mountainside to find a new cave.

\---

The quarry at Sahrnia had two states: crawling with people and empty. The guard towers always had two men awake and alert, but Fi had no trouble sneaking past them. The snow was packed down enough by the Orlesians that she didn’t leave any footprints. The soft sound from her pack hitting her back as she ran was easily drowned out by the wind howling through the man-made quarry depths.

Every scrap of paper she found she shoved into her pack. They were probably boring, but they might have had information on the crumbly red rock or why it was so cold or where to find good bugs in the cold, so she took them all the same. The real depths of the quarry seemed abandoned despite the still-visible veins of dawnstone. Fi tapped the vein a few times with a stick and then made her way back up the ladders and through the tunnels.

She was about to go back to her hidden campsite when she heard whispering. After pulling her hood back from her ears, Fi slowly stalked towards the sound. She passed benches and tables with more papers and empty glass bottles, all of which she put in her bag while keeping her head tilted at the best angle to hear the whispering. No matter how far she walked, the whispering never became any louder, nor did it become understandable. With a frown, she entered a tunnel with almost no frozen snow left after the trampling of countless feet.

In the shelter of the tunnel, she pulled her hood the whole way down and turned her head this way and that, trying to locate the source of the whispering. With footsteps as light as feathers, Fi made her way down the tunnel. With each step, more and more of the ground was covered with bright crumbs of the red rock. They seemed to almost glow in the dimness. At first, Fi took great care to avoid stepping on the red dirt, but eventually that became impossible, so she simply made her footfalls as light and quick as possible. She was panting for breath when she finally reached a large, natural cavern.

Even if the space had been created naturally, the sides were all lined with iron cells with bright, silverite locks. But there was no one  _ in _ the cells. They seemed to be holding large chunks of the red rock captive. Blinking, Fi stalked towards one of the cells, not stopping until she was pressed up against the bars. The chunk of red rock stood nearly straight like a stalagmite and had less black impurities than the one Fi had seen just outside of the shem town.

She turned to look at the one in the next cell. Her eyes widened and her heart felt like it had stopped in her chest. There was an  _ arm _ sticking out the red rock. Just like the bone she found a few days before, veins of the red rock splintered down the length. Her eyes, the only part of her that could still move, quickly scanned over the rest of the rock and there, near the top, that was a long, tapered ear. Fi’s looked back at the arm, feeling short of breath, but unable to give her lungs the command to breathe.

Then the arm moved.

He body came to life all at once. Her lungs belted out a scream, her arms flailed for her bow and her legs sprinted out of the cavern and into the tunnel. Her boots crunched and slipped on the crumbs of red rock and every sound just made her heart skip another beat. She couldn’t even spare the thought to listen for the guards as she fled the quarry. Her feet didn’t stop until she was nestled in front of her little fire with her two packs between her and the cave entrance like squishy barricades.

She didn’t sleep that night.


	3. Chapter 3

Morning dawned cold and far too bright. The light hurt Fi’s eyes, but at least it banished the red tinge that had settled over her vision. She stood and shook herself like a wet mabari before sitting again and stirring her fire. Once it was blazing more than was efficient, she pulled out her spare chemise. With a frown, she cut it into swatches. Carefully, she used the swatches to remove her boots without getting any of the crumbs of red rock on her gloves.

The leather was already blackening under the dust. Once they were off, she hesitated before tossing them onto the fire. The red rock was useful. It killed her bugs and ruined her boots and wouldn’t be good for  _ hunting, _ but she didn’t need help with hunting. She’d been a better hunter than Daeron since she was six and he was twelve. What she needed was something to get rid of the wild templars and loose mages from the shem rebellion.

So Fi dug through her pack with the ribbons that had once been white and pulled out the bottles she’d taken from the quarry. She threw away the ones that were cracked or didn’t have stoppers. Then, she took the one with the widest mouth and used it to scrape up the crumbs of red rock. They made tinkling sounds like crystal when they hit the inside of the bottle. Once she’d collected all there was to gather, Fi tossed her boots into the fire. She took notes on the odd flickers of blue and green in the fire and then added a symbol for the tinkling sound.

She wrapped up her feet in the leftover pieces of her chemise and then tied oilskin around them with the last of her silk ribbons. She would have to leave Emprise du Lion and get new boots soon. A gust of wind dropped fat, fresh snowflakes on her face and Fi wrinkled her nose. Very soon.

Once her feet were warm enough, Fi put her back to the fire and grabbed the wad of papers she’d taken out of the quarry. Even if the Orlesians couldn’t speak properly, their writing was clear, if fancy for no reason. She held the crumpled papers in her left hand while taking notes with her right.

Most of the papers were letters complaining about the cold, or the lack of food, or the lack of women, Fi snorted at those ones. She tore off the blank sections of paper to keep and threw the rest into the fire. If the men cared, they could write new ones with their fancy quills and expensive inks. After a while, Fi just threw all of the cheap papers into the fire without reading them. The heavy ones had information on the quarry.

The crumbly red rock was lyrium made wrong. It seemed weird to Fi, but shems were good at making things wrong, so she didn’t question it. The lyrium was turned wrong and someone called The Elder One told them that if they stuck it onto people those people would turn into it. Fi blinked at that line and thought maybe whomever wrote it was mad, but several other papers had instructions on exactly how much red lyrium you needed to ‘seed’ a person.

Except they didn’t say person. They said elves at first. Then the newer papers said slaves. Fi ripped those pages up before tossing them into the fire.

Fi went to wrap her notes up in ribbon so they would mix with her blank papers, but then remembered the last of her ribbons were on her feet. She frowned at the papers for a while before shoving them inside of her shirt. While they were cold at first, once they warmed up they made  _ her _ feel warmer. She again stuck her tongue out at Daeron’s memory. The things she put in her shirt were much more useful than  _ breasts _ would ever be.

\---

Fi left Emprise du Lion the next day. Even though she very much needed new boots, or preferably to be somewhere she didn’t need boots, she stopped at the first big rock of red lyrium she’d found. This time, she scared off the enthralled nug, not sure she wanted to eat it if it had spent too much time with the red lyrium. She pulled her bottles out one by one and used the mouth of each to scrape off and collect as much red lyrium as she could.

The bottles glowed softly - the light from the green ones was even a very nice color - but Fi wasn’t worried. She had carefully used a half-rotten shirt she found in the snow to wipe away any stray crumbs of red lyrium to keep them outside of her packs. They didn’t clink as she walked; she had her crumpled, blank paper wedged between them so she could still hunt without trouble.

It took a full day of walking for Fi’s feet to warm up enough to be unwrapped. She frowned at the state of her ribbons, but stuffed them back in her pack anyway. She would find a use for them later. When she was folding up the oilskins she’d put around her feet, she saw a large green beetle. It walked on four legs with the two at the front holding a leaf it was eating. Fi watched it walk to the end of the branch where it stopped and simply ate. She ripped a big, yellow leaf off of the tree and scooped up the beetle to take it with her.

She didn’t understand why Orlesians were so obsessed with gemstones. This beetle’s glittering green and black shell was much prettier than any emerald she’d ever seen. There was a red beetle in the Free Marches that matched it. She could probably find one if she went back to Ferelden. They didn’t kill all of the interesting bugs in their cities like they did in Orlais. And it was nice to hunt with mabari sometimes. They could keep up with her. And the Hero of Ferelden was an elf - that made them nicer to Fi when she was there.

Crossing the Frostbacks took a month by itself. Fi didn’t see any more of the red lyrium. She liked it. It made templar armor burst into flames. Well, it made their stupid Chantry tabards burst into flames. The armor just melted a little. She only had one jar of it left by the time she made it to Redcliffe. It was the largest jar, with the wide mouth, but she’d poured some of the red lyrium into small bottles that she’d kicked at a stupid shem mage that wouldn’t leave her alone.

After paying for her room at the inn, the stupid innkeeper had only accepted goats or coin, not the fancy gown she’d stolen, Fi sat cross-legged on the floor staring at the jar. She needed more red lyrium, but she wasn’t going to turn  _ people _ into it. She checked her notes; she didn’t have enough to ‘seed’ a person, anyway.

As she watched the red lyrium do nothing, she tried to think of a solution, but the whispering from the other rooms was so loud it was difficult to concentrate. When she was tapping the side of the jar, a field mouse ran across the floor next to her. Fi snapped out her hand and caught the mouse by its tail. It squeaked and flailed all of its legs.

Then Fi had an idea.

She opened the jar and dropped the mouse inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Part 2 will come out shortly, promise! In the meantime, please check out [@vilemie and her awesome content!](https://vilemie.tumblr.com/)


End file.
